The Autumn Prince
by Sera dy Relandrant
Summary: 1523. What if Catherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur had a son?


**1523**

_"Your Grace's court is in bloom this spring," said the Bishop of Badajoz, the Spanish ambassador to the English court. "The coffers burst with gold and the queen bursts with child."  
_

_She laughed. "How impudent of you, My Lord. The queen is too slender to 'burst' with child. But you must not say 'my court'. My son, the king's court perhaps. My most cherished daughter, the queen's, certainly," she replied. "But me? No. Why I am only the Princess Dowager of Wales. I am but a widow, soon to be a granddame."  
_

_"Your Grace dissembles prettily. This is England," the Bishop continued, "Widows and mothers rise highest here."_

_She hides her smile behind her fan. But the Bishop has a point. This is the country where Margaret Beaufort, My Lady, the King's Mother, rose with her son Henry. This is the country where Catalina of Aragon, Princess Dowager of Wales, rose with her son Arthur.  
_

"Skylarks and mayflowers and such witching weather and tis scarce April," Jane Seymour, the Princess Dowager's pet Maid of Honor sang out. She leaned out of the window, propriety and elegance cast to the winds, and sniffed the air hungrily. "Godspeed the spring!"

Several of the more refined young ladies (the ones in the pearl-studded French hoods and diamond collars) looked at eachother and hid their smiles. Poor, plain Mistress Seymour - _such _a Wiltshire peasant, at heart. Perhaps she thought she was still at dear little Wolf Hall, where she'd frisk with the scullery maids and weave gay pansy garlands on Mayday.

The Princess Dowager herself, smiled indulgently. "Perhaps it will be warm enough for our little maids to dress in their lightest silks when Maying time comes," she suggested.

The Queen, always arch-tongued (French Princesses were known for the sprightliness of their wit and their dark mirth) and sharper than usual due to her pregnancy snapped, "Aye, to show off their figures to best advantage, no doubt. So who among my merry maids will be Queen of the May this year?"

The girls were clever enough to look down demurely at their embroidery. It was the King's pleasure and privilege to choose the Queen of the May. Last year it had been the Queen herself, newly come from France, a golden Valois beauty and a treasured little bride. But this year she was with child and for some months, the King had sought his pleasure with others. It was a most natural and correct state of affairs - His Majesty was a lusty young man of strong appetites and it would be sin were he to take the Queen until after she was churched (many months hence). And then the court was full of pretty young girls with ambitious families behind them... it was only Her Majesty who took such an unreasonable view of what everyone had expected!

"What, quite mum, all of you?" the Queen asked sharply. "Full well does it come clear to me - Lady Tailboys will wear the pansy crown this year, if Lady Carey does not usurp her place. I do not see them in my apartments at all these days - they both seem to be competing for His Majesty's favor."

"Oh they are most devout in their ministrations to His Majesty. Flawless - if they spent half as much time on Monsieur, the King of Heaven as they do on Monsieur, the King of England Your Grace would be pleased," pert Mistress Boleyn, Lady Carey's younger sister, says. She is steeped in Frenchness, from nape to heels, and therefore the Queen's favorite. "They attend on His Majesty both of them together, on their knees!"

The Queen roars with laughter at this bawdy joke and the Princess Dowager sighs and looks down. She had never wanted a French Princess as a wife for her son. They all seemed so _unmaidenly _- when she had come to England as a bride she'd been veiled from head to toe but when her daughter-in-law had landed the French hood she wore showed off all her hair and the stylish bodice showed off nearly all her bosom. But then there were alliances and treaties to be considered and the temptation of a Tudor-Valois prince had proved irresistable to the House of Lords.

"I hope that he will be able to tell Mary Carey and Bessie Tailboys apart," the Queen says. "They are both so alike - golden-haired, blue-eyed-"

"Sweet as fresh-plucked cherries," Anne Boleyn finishes, the very picture of virginal grace.

Catherine of Aragon clears her throat loudly. "Cherished daughter," she says, a reprimand in her voice. She treats her daughter-in-law the deference due to an anointed queen. Margaret Beaufort had failed to exercise the same discretion in her treatment of her daughter-in-law and granddaughter-in-law - and the moment her son was off the throne, she'd been packed off to an abbey for her pains.

There are, however, occassions where a firmer hand, an older woman's guidance, is required. "You have in your service many young maids for whose virgin ears such tales are not fit or meet. Mistress Boleyn - trim that clever tongue of yours before someone snips it short."

The girls - they really are only girls, for the Queen will be a mother at seventeen and Mistress Boleyn is sixteen - curtsy and then the Queen says, "Mistress Boleyn, come here. I need you to sort my sewing silks - they are sadly tangled."

"Your Majesty's wish is my command," Anne Boleyn says and in a sweep of yellow silk, she is at the Queen's side and soon they are gossiping and giggling - though their voices are too low-pitched for the younger girls and the older women to hear. They make such a pretty tableau - Anne, as dark as her pretty sister is fair, an alluring vixen of a girl, as whorish a virgin as you could ever hope to find. The Queen in the most beautiful state a woman can find herself in - the state of pregnancy. And Catherine smiles to herself, thinking how far she has come from when she was with child herself to now when her son's first child will soon be born.

_She peeks over his shoulder at the letter he is writing and can't stifle a giggle. "A late Christmas present for your lady grandmother," she says lightly.  
_

_"Very late, she'll say," Arthur says, signing his name with a flourish at the end. Your most dutiful and loving grandson, Arthur, Prince of Wales. "And it is rather, isn't? Tomorrow will be the first day of February."_

_"Aye, but the present was in the making for her at Twelfth Night," Catherine says coquettishly. "We would have delievered the news sooner had we known."_

_He chuckles and rests his fingers on her stomach, flat and smooth still. "Kicking?" he asks hopefully. _

_"Marry, you are a fool indeed if you think a child, conceived but a month, may kick in the stomach," she says. "You know nothing of woman's ways - I will have you apprenticed to Dona Elvira."_

_"God spare me from your dragoness duenna," Arthur says fervently. "But if it is a son we have made, a bonny, strong Tudor prince-"_

_"No, even then he would not kick until- oh I do not know how many months hence, but it will be quite long," she replies. "And it is early days for us yet," she says. "We were wed in November and by December's end, we had a child in the making. You have your grandfather, King Edward's fecundity - he made ten children with Queen Elizabeth, did he not?"_

_"And seven of them girls," Arthur says gloomily. "We must have a son, Catalina, a son we will name Arthur-"_

_"Or a daughter Mary," Catherine says smoothly. "We are young yet - what does it matter whether our firstborn be a son or a daughter? I will count it as God's grace, whether it be a girl or a boy, and I will love a girl as much as a boy."_

_"But grandmother will not," Arthur laughs. "And youth is no guarantee for a long life - take plague and consumption and smallpox and dissenters at strife with our reign and-"_

_She slaps him playfully. "Naughty boy," she laughs. "Do you not know that it is ill-wishing to think of your own death? You have many years ahead of you, Arthur-" She is about to begin a speech extolling his virtues and how he will be a great king but he captures her lips with his own and then she cannot speak._

Lady Carey _nee _Mary Boleyn has slunk into the Queen's apartments, her rightful place but one where she is not seen often these days. Catherine beckons to her with a smile - she's a sweet, guileless little thing, though her father, Sir Thomas, is a ravening wolf. To Mary, King Arthur is a handsome fairytale king and she is already neck-deep in love with him - to her father, the king is a goldmine and his daughter a pickaxe.

"What, up from your knees?" her little sister asks brightly, mirth in her voice, jealousy burning black in her eyes. "Supplanted by Lady Tailboys, sweet sister?"

"Oh _Anne_," the Queen cries. "You ought not be so wicked - Lady Carey is too gentle, too delicate. She would never be on her knees - she must have been on her back."

"Nay, Your Majesty," Anne smiles. "I have the sharper eyes - on her back she would be worth a string of pearls. On her knees - for it is more strenous, of a surety - it would be a necklace of diamonds such as she wears now."

Mary flushes scarlet, but there is a glint of triumph in her mild blue eyes that she takes no trouble to disguise. She has suffered enough at the Queen's hands these past few months - payback is sweet. It is a pleasure to see the haughty Queen humbled as she falls back against her chair. Even Anne is amused - ah these clever Boleyn girls. The elder has the King wound around her finger, the younger has the Queen. But then - they are the daughters of a self-made man. Their wit is a part of their dowry.

Catherine rises smoothly to the occassion, as always. "Lady Carey, Mistress Boleyn," she says. "Perhaps you would care to call His Majesty to the Queen's apartments? You are distressed, dear?" she asks solicitously.

The Queen mutters something and rising, the two girls curtsey gracefully as they have been taught to at the French court. A sweep of yellow silk, a sweep of blue, the sisters walk arm-in-arm and before they shut the great doors Anne Boleyn's tinkling laughter floats into the room. The Queen flinches. "I was a fool," she mutters. "I am as lovesick for him as the day I was when I first saw him and found him to be more handsome than his portrait." Catherine remembers her, a shining-eyed girl of fourteen. So sprightly, so spirited - the Archbishop of Canterbury (the King's Uncle Henry) had called her a 'French Catalina', for she reminded him so much of Catherine when she had landed first on English shores.

But Catherine had been brought before a shy, milky-skinned boy a few months younger than her. The Queen was brought before a twenty-year-old man who was already called the 'fairest prince in all Christendom', red-haired, frank-faced and with a smile that stopped hearts. She had been allowed to keep her illusions. Perhaps that was why, when the heartbreak came, it was so much harder to bear.

Catherine strokes her hand softly. "And he is as lovesick for you," she says, resolving to have a private talk with her wilful son. He would do better to conduct his affairs with more discretion - and as for diamond necklaces for whores - well! "A mistress does not change anything."

The Queen sniffs as though to say, _that's easier said than understood. _"At least you were spared _that_," she says sulkily. "Your husband-"

"I was a bride in November and a widow by April," Catherine says lightly. Twenty-one years have passed. The memories do not hurt - she scarcely feels their weight at all. "And he was a boy of sixteen. When could he be unfaithful to me?"

The Queen sighs. "Did you love him? I knew you had such a short time with him but you never did marry after he died and you could have, you were only seventeen and the greatest beauty in the world-"

Catherine laughs. "How very childish we find ourselves today! Didn't you and Mistress Seymour have a joust of words a sennight hence, about love? You said it was the greatest sin to love one's husband, that love's sceptre was a tyrant's rod, a slave's collar-"

The Queen laughs brittly. "Oh I was just trying to be clever! And it was so fun to tease Jane - she was so very in earnest that she couldn't understand that the jest was on her." She pauses and then returns to the main topic. She wants a fairytale. Catherine will not give it to her. "But did you love him?"

"I was quite fond of him," Catherine answers coolly. "Fondness oils the wheels of a marriage, my mother told me before I left Spain. But love - no. Love is an indiscretion."

_She was plump and rosy when she left court in December, a swirl of red-gold hair and laughing blue eyes. She wore a bride's warm, scarlet velvets, she had a prince on her arm and a court at her feet. A May Queen in hoary December.  
_

_She comes back in May, pale and pensive, clad in a widow's black crepe. Downcast eyes and hair hidden behind a gable hood, quite as simple as that which the King's mother wears. She is a shadow of what she was, a picture bleached of all the colors - an Ice Princess in green May._

_"I suppose we'll have to wait until she drops an heir," Lady Margaret asks her son acidly. "Until we know if it's a boy or a girl she's carrying, she will be our most cherished daughter, the Princess Dowager of Wales, lapped in milk and honey. Until then we'll have to put up with her airs and effrontery - that chit acts as though she was the only one ever in the world to be widowed! I lost three husbands and in direr circumstances than _her _but did I ever put up my feet and languish like a-"_

_"She is grieving," King Henry VII says quietly. "She must have loved him."_

_Lady Margaret snorts eloquently. "Loved! Aye, she's grieving alright - for her little court at Ludlow where I was not present and she was free to queen it as she pleased. Grieving that she'll never be Queen of England as she and her mother plotted. Grieving because she doesn't know whether it's a boy or whether it's a wretched girl she's carrying." Her eyes narrow. "What if it _is _a girl? We can't have a girl as the heir - it will never do."_

_"If it is a girl," the king says decisively, "Henry will be the heir, and the best we can do is arrange a good marriage for Arthur's daughter." The country is newly risen from the wars and the blood feuds - putting a half-Spanish child queen on the throne would only ignite them again.  
_

Henry joins her at the window. "Symmetrical incongruity," he murmurs, looking down at the three who are walking, arms linked with eachother, down the rosewalk. "Beautiful."_  
_

The king, a tall, red-haired Adonis, with a Boleyn girl on each arm - one as fair as Argive Helen, the other a dark Clytemnestra. Anne to heat his blood, Mary to warm his bed.

"I wish you'd have a word with him," she says sharply. "It's an uncle's duty. You've certainly taught him all he knows about light women."

Henry's eyebrows arch. "He's handsome, he's robust - quite like I was at his age."

_Yes, _thinks Catherine, smiling. _I wonder who thought you'd be suitable as a churchman. _Henry, once Duke of York, now Archbishop of Canterbury and the only English Cardinal, is the merriest and loosest of all churchmen. And yet they mean to make this boyish-hearted man a Pope, the first English Pope since Nicholas Breakspeare! Religion and politics make strange bedfellows.

"Why should he not keep women that meet his fancy?"

"His wife-"

"Oh, she'll have to learn to put up with it," Henry says nonchalantly.

Privately Catherine agrees but she says, "Perhaps - but he might be taught to conduct himself with more... discretion. Openly flaunting them in her face isn't done and the way he squanders crown jewels on them, you'd think diamonds grew on trees! The Queen was distressed - as any virtuous woman would be."

"And she must be humoured until she is brought to bed of a prince," Henry says and then changes the topic. "Mistress Boleyn is quite fetching, is she not?"

Henry has a taste for fine wine and finer women. Catching the Archbishop's ear is one step closer to catching the Princess Dowager's ear, and from hence the King's ear - Catherine has always trusted her brother-in-law's excellent judgment. Four years ago, fifteen-year-old Bessie Blount had given him a son - Lord Henry Fitzyork - and had been amply rewarded by having her marriage arranged to Lord Tailboys and catching the King's eye, for where Henry led, his adoring nephew loyally followed. Fitzyork was being raised in the Duke of Norfolk's household and his doting father already had plans for him - the Earldom of Richmond perhaps.

"Arthur seems to find Lady Carey more fetching," Catherine says dryly.

"Wispy," Henry says dismissively. "Too blonde, too wifely. But her sister-" he smiles.

"She might be interested in a proposition from you," Catherine says dryly. "They're ambitious both of them, terribly ambitious."

"Sugar and spice. Ambitious women whet an ambitious man's appetite."

"I hope you haven't taught Arthur that."

He smiles wolfishly, "Catherine, the trust you place in me is as charming as it is addle-pated. Of course I have - haven't I taught him everything that he shouldn't know?"

_The wet-nurse places the three-month-old infant in her arms. Arthur, Prince of Wales. Her autumn prince, her saviour. _

_"I never fail to marvel at his beauty, at his perfections," Catherine tells her mother-in-law softly, rocking the baby. "Everytime I see him, I thank God for giving him to me, unworthy as I am."_

_Queen Elizabeth smiles, she is about to say something but then her impetuous six-year-old daughter, Princess Mary interrupts her. "He _still _doesn't have any hair. I wouldn't call him beautiful." But then she relents and says graciously, "But he's very sweet."_

_"He looks very like his father," Elizabeth says. _

_"My lady grandmother said he looks like me," Henry, Duke of York says petulantly. With the birth of Prince Arthur, he has been neatly shifted down the line of succession. He was Heir Presumptive for a few months but come spring, he will be trained for the church as his father had decided when he was born. _

_Catherine looks at the high-spirited little boy and wonders what he thinks about it, whether he resents his nephew's birth at all or whether he is really too young to mind. He is only eleven - that is old enough, surely, for vaulting ambition but then Henry is such a child yet. _

_"He is as handsome as his uncle, which makes him handsomer than his late father," Catherine says gamely and is rewarded by Henry's smile. The boy fancies himself in love with her and she is always as sweet to him as she can be. If anything should happen to her precious darling - and these things happen so easily, infants dying before they are a year old, frail children dying before they can talk, little boys killed by the plague or the pox... If anything should happen, Henry will be the heir. It is wise to be on his good side._

_"My Lady has ordered that he will be brought up away from court," Elizabeth says. "He is to be brought up as your late husband was - Arthur was sent to Ludlow Castle when he was six."_

_"At least we will not be separated. We will leave for Wales next month," Catherine says cheerfully, kissing her son. She wonders how she could bear a separation. She could not - on her knees she would have petitioned the haughty Lady Margaret to permit her to be with her son. "Did you feel the separation from Arthur very much, mother?"_

_"No," Elizabeth says, coolly for her. Catherine is expecting a fairytale. Elizabeth does not give it to her. "I could never forget that as Queen I had other duties to attend to." This is a woman who has outlived her dynasty, the daughter, sister, niece, wife and grandmother of kings. This is a woman who has lived in the magnificence of royal palaces and in the simplicity of abbeys, who has survived civil strife, treason, plots and a harrowing mother-in-law. She would be well able to endure a separation. "My Lady, the King's mother, did not see fit to permit me to have a larger hand in my sons' rearing. I was told to content myself with my daughters."  
_

_"Perhaps there are advantages to never wearing a Queen's crown," Catherine says lightly. "Perhaps it is better to be Princess Dowager of Wales."  
_

Catherine steps out of the Queen's chambers and accosts her son.

"Mother," he says guiltily, letting go of the girls. He blushes. She smiles. He is still her little boy at heart, the little boy who would steal green apples in the orchard. When she told him that it was most unfitting that the King of England should go about plucking unripe apples and that thieving was a sin he'd said, "Oh, mother, they taste better _because_ they're stolen. Uncle Henry says they smack of the original sin."

"Monsieur the Champion of the Catholic Faith," she says teasingly. That is what the Pope calls him - the Champion of the Catholic Faith. He was always devout - he learnt his piety at his mother's knee. Now, as a grown man he is most assiduous in his crusade against the heretical German princes. The 'Monsieur' part is Anne Boleyn's addition. "Were you whispering your prayers into Lady Carey's mouth, as you two walked through the gardens."

"I-"

"Your lady _wife_ would be glad of your company," Catherine says curtly, emphasizing 'wife'. "She is poorly tonight."

At once Arthur is attentive. Pregnant wives take priority over even the prettiest mistresses. And he trails behind his mother, taking her lead as he has always done.

**A/N: This is an interesting plot bunny isn't it? I'd love to see more stories on this premise!**


End file.
